A Californian cannot be blamed for not knowing that there is a California state librarian.

Or at least for not realizing that there is one who still oversees our books and the places they are kept in the wake of the mightily famous and intellectually imposing person who long held that post, the late Kevin Starr, who wrote the multi-volume history we all know as the key to the lock that is understanding our state from the Gold Rush until today.

And yet there is such a person, Greg Lucas, and when I walked into my office the other day to meet him, he was already there, early, tall, burly, bearded, with a pirate’s gold earring.

No one’s stereotypical idea of a librarian, that is. But as the son of a librarian myself — one who was elegant, artistic, a lifelong rebel — I knew that the prim cliche is not based on fact.

As we walked out for coffee, I knew there was something else simpatico about Lucas, and soon found out why: For most of his career, he was a newspaperman, at the old Orange County edition of the Times and for 19 years as a Sacramento reporter and bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle.

I wrote my friend Allen Matthews, Chron city editor in Lucas’s day, inquiring. “Greg was a great reporter and a hoot,” Allen wrote back. “And did you know his father was the California Supreme Court chief justice?”

Oh, that Lucas family. Judge on the Manson case. The chief who replaced Rose Bird. What a California legacy he carries.

When he was appointed to the post four years ago by Gov. Jerry Brown, Lucas faced initial opposition from working librarians, who pointed out that his degrees were in writing and communications, not in library science. But Starr himself, when appointed San Francisco librarian, faced the same criticism, and went back to take a library degree. So did Lucas, taking a master’s at San Jose State in order to speak the lingua franca.

After four years in the post, our big boss librarian is clearly enjoying himself, and over coffees at a cafe is a rapid-fire proselytizer for the profession. He sees the state library and the many city and county libraries as having three key roles.

First, the Sacramento branch is both a resource for electeds and appointeds in the Capitol, as well as being the California version of the Library of Congress, with a vast history collection, including James Marshall’s original map of his American River discovery of gold.

Second, libraries are a community place, one that Lucas says polling shows millenials revere above all others, cooler even than coffee shops as somewhere to gather on neutral ground. The “Ghostbusters” library in Manhattan “blew out its back wall and put in a window that looks out over the park,” Lucas says, and it’s become a gathering spot the way the corner pub is in Britain. The “quiet, please” days are gone.

Third, and going back to its original core principles, a library is fundamentally about reading. “If you can’t read, it’s like you’re still living in a cave,” Lucas says. And for all the talk of our living in a postmodern, graphically oriented world, there is no way to succeed without it. “Seventy percent of our prison population is functionally illiterate,” Lucas says.

And since the California we live in now is the most diverse society in the history of civilization, with many people coming here having other languages as their first one, our libraries today are gathering centers. Lucas says that it’s absolutely fascinating to drop in at the Los Angeles public library at Third Street and Vermont Avenue, where Bengalis, Koreans and Oaxacans predominate, learning how to be American in the best possible American place.

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.